As I stated on my ldjam submission, game can be found here :
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deeper-faster
https://vikaster.itch.io/deeper-faster
I participated in my first « official » Game Jam , Ludum Dare #48 this April 2021. I don’t need to explain what Ludum Dare is, it’s the most famous Game Jam since its creation in 2004.
This Year Theme was « Deeper & Deeper », which I upvoted, so I’m glad they choose this one over the other themes.
There was 2 formats (which i didn’t know) :
- the « Compo » which lasted for 48 hours,
- and the « Jam » which lasted for 72 hours.
I choose to stick to the 72 hours format, because as a beginner I knew I couldn’t make a game in 48 hours whatsoever.
Prior to the Ludum Dare, i cut my teeth out to game developping with a couple of frameworks like Easel / Create, ImpactJS, Coco-2d and Construct 3 of course, mostly 2d game engines, so i decided to choose Construct 3 to make a game, because it seemed like given the time we had (not much) it would be faster for me to get a prototype out of this engine (Construct), which allow you to make games whiteout coding every-single-aspect of the game (like the collisions, the graphics update, the UI… and so on. Construct take care of all of that for you, and you don’t need to “hard code” the bitmap image etc. I made a couple of game design decisions, which I’ll explain later.
Back to the game’s creation process, I started first « sketching » the game with 3 levels of depth, and the player with a standard diving dress, and I thought something was going wrong. I was not going to make a game like that.
The sketch pictured lasers and rays and exits in Mario 3 fashion… you see where I was heading to! I was going to make a plateformer again !! Yeah !!!
So I decided to work directly on the game window, and made a blob that I previously animated in Gimp and another tool on clip art studio.
He couldn’t shoot or attack nor the enemies, but he could jump and move around seamlessly. There was 3 types of enemies : sea snails (2), red fish (1), and big black fish (1).
I didn’t make sound design ( I was too late on Schedule ). I know it’s terrible. And this is something that is a bit of a pity for me, since I’m also a muscian/ composer myself, I make midi soundtracks which you can check on my Youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIpgvLXgm1uK2JQW1S585aw .
But I didn’t have time to think about a Sound design, and i regret that because it would have been nice to put some sounds to theses animations.
Back to the game. I wanted the player to skip battles, and jump toward victory. Because the fastest battle is the one you can avoid (it’s definitely not from me, I’m as peaceful as an orchid ), player should always have the choice. Which i didn’t give him. XD
Now, a lot of players told me about the Jump animation, many liked its colours shifting, some didn’t like the speed of the animation ( but I couldn’t accelerate it because then you have to draw more frames etc too complicated ( I think mine was 12, I may use 24fps in the next jam ).
Thanks for reading me, and if you liked this article don’t forget to like!
— Vikaster —
